The Brazilian agricultural sector
Brazil is a country with an agricultural vocation, where approximately ¼ of the GDP comes from agribusiness. The biggest crops grown here are soybeans, corn, cotton, sugar cane, coffee, oranges, vegetables and flowers. We export several of these products such as soy, corn, coffee and sugar and are recognized as an important player in the global commodities market.
Brazil has a tropical agriculture, where we can grow and produce food all year round, bringing with it important challenges such as: the need for seeds with high production potential, with high adaptability to climatic conditions and also to phytosanitary management, thus allowing important progress in the development of products and services that accompany these particularities.
Farming takes place on a daily basis through the hands of more than 5 million rural producers whose mission is to produce food in a sustainable and modern way.
Marketing and agribusiness
I think it's worth mentioning here that in agribusiness there's no chance of success without concrete deliveries, i.e. the seed needs to produce, the fertilizer needs to work, the sprayer needs to apply pesticides, and increasingly with the precision of telemetry.
Marketing is born having to connect the work of geneticists, climatologists, researchers, product development teams and so on. We work with an open-air factory and with it a narrative that seeks to insert products and services into farms and their wider context, helping producers to produce more and more in an intelligent and sustainable way, despite their challenges.
Marketing and sales take on a very consultative role in agriculture, where marketing positions products, services and technologies that not only help increase productivity, but also bring greater adaptability, safety and profitability to the producer. Our dialog goes beyond the farm gates, our dialog reaches the end consumers who today want to know how the food on their tables was produced.
It's important to get to know the producers and their decision-making and purchasing journeys and to work on maximizing the delivery of the value proposition of products and brands - more than just communicating, promises need to be delivered consistently. Marketing also has a very important educational role, producing content and being present where the producer is - omnichannel is increasingly a reality and with the plurality of generations, physical and digital are equally important, but compared to other countries, today we work with younger and more connected farmers.
We're digital, at agricultural fairs, field days, billboards, magazines, universities, research institutions, banks and in every home.
Marketing accompanies the producer's challenges 24:7 without breaks and without interruption, and even helps to position and highlight him as an important player in the world economy.
Innovation
Agribusiness has gone through several phases, but the ones that have had the greatest impact and brought significant leaps in productivity have been, in order: the use of agricultural correctives, the adoption of no-till farming, biotechnology and, most recently, the use of data - which will bring about an even greater evolution in productivity and profitability, enabling us to analyze plant by plant and make increasingly precise decisions.
For the following years? There's a whole universe of possibilities here: nanotechnology, large-scale use of drones, biofertilizers, increasing the area of organic farming, plant-based food (like the Impossible Burger), autonomous machines, new business models (carbon, shared risks), robotics and others.
Today in Brazil we already have more than 1,500 agtechs working on ideas to improve agricultural activity both on and off the farm, which means there's a lot more to come.
